1. When you do numbers in math, and say 1 + 1 equals 2, is the 2 actually 2 units of precisely the same size, or does the quantity within the numbers augment as you go? When you count, are the units in 3 all equal, or is it trickier than that?
2. why did the dinosaurs die? And are we sure they all did?
3. why do they ask questions about apples and oranges being in the same barrel in my arithmetic book? Everybody knows oranges spoil really fast, but apples will last for a long time if you keep them cool, and everybody knows if you put rotten fruit up against good fruit, the good fruit is apt to start rotting sooner. So the answer to how many apples and how many oranges in the barrel is “No oranges if you don’t sell them real fast, and a lot fewer apples than you would have had if you’d stored them properly in their own barrel.”
4. where do shooting stars come from?
5. what makes lightning bugs glow?
6. how does grandma’s crank phone work?
7. why can pigs eat dirt and not get sick?
8. why do rainbows move when you chase them?
9. why does it rain?
10. where did all the water in the oceans come from?
Oddly enough, some are still real good questions.
Drove your grandma nuts, didn’t you? And as for teachers …
I also would’ve understood negative numbers at 6, had any teacher had the smarts to tell me that when I subtract the big number from the little number (which I did a lot) I have to put a – in front of the result. I dealt in allowances and saving money for things and I really understood being ‘in the hole’ with numbers. So if they’d said, “So you borrow on next week’s allowance and buy this thing for 75 cents when you only have .50, what do you have?’ -.25…I’d have grokked that. They just said ‘You can’t do that,” but clearly you could, because I just did, and nothing exploded. I was just putting the wrong sign (+/-)in front of the result.
I was also a detail person. My poor teacher (the one I really liked) announced that no fish have necks. I immediately shot up my hand and asked, “What about seahorses?”
Now, technically…
But I knew a lot about seahorses.
My problems mainly came from reading things that were supposedly too advanced for my age, and asking for clarification, or getting the wrong idea entirely. I remember quietly reading Readers’ Digest at age 7 or so, one of their ‘Drama in Real Life’ features, and asking my father what an “S.O.B.” was. Hilarity ensued.
Lol. I read ANYTHING. I can recall being so desperate for reading material, I got into my uncle’s aviation mags (Korean War and earlier) and was quietly memorizing the procedure for landing a sea plane.
I memorized the rigging for a tall ship. Stood me in good stead when I began to read Patrick o’Brien.
I memorized maps. (Cajeiri comes by his hobby honestly.) I memorized diagrams. I graduated from the Golden Book Encyclopedia to The World Book Encyclopedia, 1950 edition, when my parents decided it would be good to have in the house. When I got sick (I had allergies and we had no ac (nobody did in those days), and had the usual measles and chickenpox—I’d take a volume of that encyclopedia and start reading it from the beginning. I got real good on topics down to M.
I’d still have trouble with some of the lines on the rigging of a tall ship. I know the difference between a sheet and a sail (even when I’m three sheets to the wind), a spar vs. a sprit, etc. But I really get uptight when people ask me what boats I was on…….”boats” are one of two things in the Navy; they’re either small craft that are carried onboard a ship and raised and lowered from davits when needed, OR, they’re those long, black ships with no visible means of propulsion that go out to the deep ocean and sink themselves on purpose for extended periods of time.
#8 happens because the leprechauns know when you’re coming, from which direction, and how fast you’re moving, so they pull the pot of gold in the appropriate direction, at the appropriate speed, and for the appropriate distance to keep you chasing the rainbow. It works, and whether or not you’re driving a Subaru (re their commercial), you can’t keep up with it.
I remember almost seeing the place where the rainbow would reach the ground, and I was out on my bike as a kid—I rode all over, even out toward the Wichita Wildlife Refuge and the Fort Sill firing range (show and tell at our grade school was interspersed with moments of terror and ‘file quietly from the room’…)
In this case I had it spotted and I rode and rode and rode, and, alas, never found the pot of gold, nor the end of the rainbow.
So what you’re saying is, the leprecauns have high-speed vehicles with four wheel drive or hover?
Well, why *shouldn’t* the faerie folk have high tech too? Wouldn’t theirs be (dare I say it?) *greener*? Particularly the Green Knight’s should be….
Funny how he does vegetable farming with his son when he’s not gallivanting about and playing mindgames with unsuspecting knights and courtiers….
That Subaru commercial’s pretty neat.
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I loved the “seahorse” question. Hahaha!
But then, I’m the one who announced to my elementary school science teacher (4th grade, maybe earlier?) that I wanted to be a paleontologist, when she asked the class what they wanted to be when they grew up. Well, I didn’t wind up a paleontologist, but I really loved the dinosaur and prehistoric beast books that were out then. My science teacher called my mother and said she’d had to look up the word. (I suspect she knew the word, though.)
I’m far better at verbal / language skills than math. I’m weaker in basic arithmetic than higher math. As a kid I *hated* memorizing multiplication tables by rote, and we were supposed to. I’m still weak at memorization, including lines of text for a play or a poem or story.
I would’ve gotten negative numbers sooner. Needing M amount of money in order to buy something, or having a debt of N amount of money still to pay, those are basic concepts. But we were introduced to the idea sometime in junior high (which they now call “middle school”).
I often wondered about those word problems, but they didn’t drive me nuts (compared to a non-word problem) the way they seemed to be another level of difficulty for some other kids.
Most of those are still great questions.
I was usually out sick with some respiratory something at some point in the winter, though I eventually mostly outgrew that. (It probably didn’t help that I got extra attention at home or at my grandmother’s.) But I read and drew a lot. My reading matter of choice became science fiction, though, and an early interest in the alphabet and calligraphy.
Hah, Ballantine’s and Dalton’s and Waldenbooks (all gone now) got a sizeable portion of my allowance, on various SF books. 😀
It was early college when a friend loaned me Downbelow Station and Pride of Chanur and told me I had to read them, since I was desperate for some good science fiction. I read DBS in one weekend, not much sleeping, either. I think Pride was a weekend or two later, or maybe in snatches during the week. I was hooked. Thankfully, my mom had Chanur’s Venture, but not the Pride, so I got a quick boost before hitting the bookstore.
I should say — Each of those three bookstores were medium-sized storefronts in three malls around town. There were two library branches within reach too. But those bookstores had manageable selections. I could go to the couple of science fiction aisles and find the latest book (to me) by Heinlein or Norton or Foster or someone I’d never heard of or other greats or rank newbies. I might walk out with a scant armload of books (so did my mom and my dad each) some of mine were bought by my parents, some by me. But that was a real treat.
My parents gave me the subversive idea that “the library has a book on *everything*, any question you could ask, all for free just for the asking.” (Or words to that effect. Yes, they were oversimplifying about having “all” the answers, but that young, I didn’t know yet.) I was younger than twelve when my parents (and the librarians) acquiesced and let me start checking out books outside the children’s section, on my parents’ cards. — I am *very* thankful they taught me to love books that early and that thoroughly.
Somehow, I didn’t get into reading classical antiquities or philosophy, even when I got older. I read a few “great literature” books for English classes, and although I usually enjoyed them, I still gravitated to SF&F, probably so I could play in my imagination, with the grand, strange ideas and the adventuring and risks I didn’t have in person, with bad eyesight.
My parents did ask that I get approval from them first for whatever books I bought. Only “Stranger in a Strange Land” was still not allowed, even in high school. (And hmm, I still need to stop and read it.) (I suspect I know one or two reasons why it wasn’t allowed, given discussions I’ve seen, but once I’ve read it, I’ll have my own conclusions.)
—–
I’m most of the way through the audiobook version of “Cuckoo’s Egg,” and it had been so long since I’d read it, it’s been like getting it new. One disadvantage of an audiobook: I don’t therefore get to see the *spelling* of foreign and alien words. The narrator does a mostly good job on pronunciation, though a handful of (English) words, he’s surprised me with his pronunciation: “clamber-” he pronounces the “B,” and “dour” came out as “doo-er,” which I suspect is a regional/dialectal variant, US or Canada NE, from Scots influence. One or two others. I am guessing he’s gotten the alien words mostly right. He’s treated all the vowels as Latin/Continental, ah, ay/eh, ee, oh, ooh. — LOL, and when I’d read it years ago, I didn’t know anime/manga references, so one word sounds like “shounen,” LOL, a fine pun.
Yes, I wandered far, far afield off topic.
No, leprechauns don’t need high speed SUVs, they have magic. Just like Tristen, and hopefully, they learn to consider the consequences of their actions when they use that magic.
Oh, Blue Cat Ship, your first several paragraphs describe me down to a ‘T’ — I used to chant my multiplication tables walking home from school in an attempt to memorize them. (If God had wanted me to do math in my head, She wouldn’t have created calculators!) I wanted to be a paleontologist, too. I suspect I’m a bit older than you are. I was looked at askance because I was such a tomboy and forewent all the “Susie Homemaker” books (gack!) in the library and went straight for the Roy Chapman Andrews books, and books about volcanoes and earthquakes, whales, ancient Egypt. . . (very anomalous for the late 1950’s!) I did a book report in 6th grade on Thor Heyerdahl’s “Aku-Aku.” However, the first time I was sick enough to miss school was in 6th grade. My brother was the sickly one (asthma). Alas, my mom wanted a “girly girl” which I am definitely not. Like you, learning to read was the greatest thing that ever happened to me in school — In reading circle, I’d always be reading ahead, and then when it was my turn, flip back, go right to the place and start reading — drove my teacher nuts. And CJ, reading the encyclopedia! I went nuts for reading matter too. The lady who kept us after school and during the summer — they never had books or magazines in their house, but they had shiny new set of World Book Encyclopedias. I whiled away many a summer afternoon browsing through them. The first thing I read of yours, CJ, was the Morgaine Trilogy — I was USAF stationed in (what was then West) Berlin — this would have been shortly after the book was published. We had an “exchange” bookcase in one of the rec rooms. You could take books and read them and bring them back (or not), and put books there you were done with. That’s where I found “The Gate of Ivrel.” (I had my first encounters with Dorothy Dunnett, Tannith Lee, Dorothy Sayers, and Georgette Heyer during those years, too). Fortunately, you could order books from AAFES. I ordered the Faded Sun trilogy from SciFi Book Club. Likewise the Chanur books (as well as Zelazny’s Amber books, Phillip Jose Farmer, A.E. Van Vogt, Ray Bradbury, etc.)
I’d answer No. 2, but it would involve explaining that the E-l*th sent the meteor into the earth as part of the terraforming process for making this a vacation world of theirs—with the express purpose of killing off said dinosaurs. They couldn’t control them, especially the big brute predators, (no higher level brain functions which made them impervious to the illusions the E-l*th used), so hence they had to be gotten rid of.
But I’m pretty sure you don’t really want to know about the E-l*th, believing as you probably do, (even as most other people do) since the brainwashing about said beings just being ‘myths’ is what you’re expected to believe or else you’re to be considered wishfully thinking, crazy, ignorant, misguided, or possessed by evil demons and what not…
The old Indian fellow, from my shaman journey to the higher plane, did confirm to me that I was chosen to be consciously connected to the racial/collective unconscious in this DSL-like manner because I could pretty easily accept all that I would see there.
He noted most people couldn’t handle the idea of aliens, much less the huge part they played in our coming into sentience; that all religions were created (or corrupted for their purposes) by those alien beings called the Jue-sah (aka the greedy 1%, many of which are the ex-high priests of Israel aka NWO bunch and so on) as control tools for the masses; that there really is a spirit/psychic realm level to existence which we’ve been mostly blinded and deafened to, but which other aliens can easily access, and then use to manipulate us through; plus a lot more of the lies the Jue-sah have been manipulating us with across the millennia.
And every day I see this is true. There is always some aspect of what I see in the racial/collective unconscious (of humanity) which is ‘unbelievable’ and ‘unacceptable’ to just about everyone I tell about this. Some can’t believe in aliens, some can’t believe what religion is really for, some can’t handle that the MSM is controlled by the 1%, and so on, while others can’t believe that the Jue-sah aka greedy 1% really do have an enslavement agenda for humanity that has spanned hundreds of thousands of years (yah, they really aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, lucky for us).
I haven’t found one single person who can even consider half of the entirety I’ve learned via the racial/collective unconscious, as the actual history of earth and humanity. So many people seem to desperately need to keep believing the lies, for some reason.
Consequently, my belief is anyone else given this kind of connection would have probably gone crazy in their efforts to try and make what they want to believe ‘true’ and deny the parts of the actual history they don’t want to believe even though they’d see it there.
Some of my ability to accept what I see there is in part due to my cult experiences as a child, I am sure, since I saw some weird stuff like a demon, and had much of the underlying ‘control’ basis for the cult ‘religion’ explained to me although I completely forgot about it on a conscious level for 40-ish years. And I always had so many questions about explanations I was given by the ‘authorities’ especially when it came to health issues. So for me, it was a huge and wonderful relief to finally be able to know the straight ‘skinny’ on what REALLY happened, and why things are the way they are.
But when things start getting more shook up, and the E-l*th make their appearance to reclaim use of this world from the Jue-sah, and hold them accountable for the horrors committed against we humans and this beautiful world, what I see in the racial/collective unconscious will be far more believable, I am sure! *lol*
In the meantime, I don’t mind at all if you think me ‘crazy’ or ‘misguided’, although it won’t stop me from sharing what I’m learning in the racial/collective unconscious. 🙂
Ohh.. and I did like No. 3! It reminds me of one of the posters I see on some of the internet sites. It has math problem involving 60 cantaloupes and the response being the real question should be what in heck am I doing with 60 cantaloupes to begin with!
Not cantaloupes, zucchini. 😀
Well, having 60 zucchini apparently isn’t all that difficult, since there are sooo many stories of people locking their cars during the summer (mostly in small towns), so that they won’t have a backseat full of ‘gift’ zucchini when they return! *lol*
I think the giants have the answer to number 4 — Well, They Might Be Giants: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqBChyNyLhU
And thanks to Maggie Hogarth for finding it: http://haikujaguar.livejournal.com/1125875.html One of my other favourite writers!
My father told me once that there were no syllables of more than five letters. Quaint idea. 😉 True in the main, but there are many exceptions.
CVC is the IndoEuropean syllable pattern—consonant-vowel-consonant. OTOH, the consonant may be (in our alphabet, but not necessary in all) a consonantal cluster, like ph, th, or (in Russian) tsch, and the vowel may be a dipthong, like ai, ae, au, ou, etc.
OK, I admit it! I’ve always born a grudge against dipthongs. They seem to have no regular pronounciation rule. 🙁 For English at least–I had no problems in German class.
I’m at odds with “ye”. I know it’s a printers trick for wedging the “thorn” into a Roman alphabet, and shoyld be pronounced “thee”. But there’s the common vernacular “ya”, short for “you”, we hear all the time. “Ye” is there ready to fill the role, but it should sound nothing like! 🙁
See why we need editing?
So you’re claiming “quaint” falls in the five-letter rule then, because “qu” should be one letter? I have found other 6, even 7, letter syllables over the years. I just never collected them.
Exactly. Qu is one letter. Q may appear in Arabic names without the -u, as in the Gulf of Aqaba, but Latin and English and the Romance languages prefer it with, and if there is a single English word that uses it alone, it is probably a borrowing from Arabic. Ai is a dipthong, and -nt is a cluster pronounced as one sound. I had, BTW, a horrid time in German, but I’m more Latinic. As for ye, it’s as often yeh as yee, and probably was more often yay than yee, even when in common use, depending, of course, on dialect. What modern liturgical use has done to King James’ English is a question.
Though is thus a two letter syllable in this paradigm? “Thorn” + “O”? 😉
There’s an explanation for why you thought of numbers that way as a child. You may have been thinking logarithmically about counting.
http://www.radiolab.org/2009/nov/30/innate-numbers/
Indeed, the first was the one that impressed me most strikingly–a number theorist at 6! “Out of the mouths of babes”, eh? That the difference between all adjacent whole numbers should be the same, may appear to be so in local experience, but it’s just definitional. It may follow from Euclid principles, e.g. parallel lines are always the same distance apart, the inner angles of a triangle always sum to 180. In Riemann Geometry parallel lines meet, the interior angles sum to more than 180 degrees. Dump Cartesian Coordinates and plot on the surface of a sphere! One “pole” is zero, and the opposite “pole” is infinity, 1/0. 😉 The curve for tangent and some hyperbolic functions becomes closed curves! 🙂
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_geometry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_the_universe
In essence, yes. It seemed far too simple a system.
I do know that I was early-on ready to think about numbers in a creative way, but thanks to a 2nd grade teacher who enforced speed and conformity with a yardstick applied across the shoulders unexpectedly — Attila the Nun had nothing on this public school lady— I couldn’t even get my combinations straight, and to this day foul up on some. I find astrophysics easier than arithmetic. 😉 This lady is always in the mental background, poised to strike, and I still remember the sound of her footsteps on the wooden floor.
OTOH, I missed half the second grade, because I called her a name, and I spent weeks and weeks in the principal’s office getting whacked and not allowed in class until I would apologize. They finally sent me back anyway, and two weeks later I broke my arm (both bones an inch above the wrist) and ended up in hospital, so second grade was not my best.
It was, however, one of the most formative. I learned ‘stubborn’ real well, and I had my parents’ backing. Even the principal’s backing. The teacher was a few months from retirement and nobody wanted to make a case of it. And I got through.
Yes, wasn’t parochial school wonderful? My first- through fourth-grade teachers were really wonderful, with a few occasions when Sister Rebecca (2nd grade) applied the principal’s paddle to my tender backside. After that, though, fifth-grade teacher was NOT ideal, she ridiculed me in front of the entire class one day, a capital offense nowadays, and generally would put out misinformation because she wanted to believe what she was telling us was the truth. It took me a long time to get over that grade, if I ever have. Sixth-grade teacher was our principal, and I’d get whacked across the back with her book, chucked under the chin with her book, and generally not treated well. In her defense, she was trying to get me to wake up and start working to what she knew were my better abilities. (Never had an IQ test, but based on various aptitude tests, I know it’s way up there, but not Marilyn Vos Savant grade) However, these were all administered in front of the entire class, she would embarrass me almost as badly as the fifth-grade teacher. To this day, I have a strong aversion to teachers who want to force me to do something I don’t like, or believe is wrong. So, perhaps I would have found astrophysics easier, but for me arithmetic is a snap. Don’t get me into calculus, I barely passed that class, and the professor was a really great teacher. (I don’t suppose my ongoing divorce had anything to do with it, though.)
Not a victim of parochial school, although I had friends attending St. Barnabas. I had go-rounds, both good and bad, regarding my ability to take advanced classes. Thank you Miss Forster, who pushed me early towards math after a discussion about — you guessed it, negative numbers. I believe most kids who received an allowance and were expected to budget from it had a pretty good handle on the concept of ‘being in the hole’. Not so many kudos to my HS guidance counselor, who wasn’t going to let me take AP physics until I got my parents in on the discussion. Due to perversity, I got A-/B+ grades throughout, that and Mr. Nebel, my teacher, another rare gem. And finally, thank you to Mrs. Carlson, first my Latin and then my English teacher, who taught me more about grammar than all my other English classes.
C.J., are you familiar with “BearLib” ebooks?
http://bearlib.com/9-ebooks-d
The reason I ask is:
http://bearlib.com/ebooks-c/29-c-j-cherryh-65-pdf-ebooks-pdf-collection.html
If I read the site correctly, this is a collection of books, not just one, for that price?!?!.
Thank you, WOL. I’ve just advised DAW, and I’m ringing the alarm over on FB. They’re Chinese, and it’s going to be a pita. I’m sure I’m not the only one targeted. They have a massive lot of scans probably done by poor villagers paid a pittance.
Glad I missed all that! My public school, at least, didn’t have all the whacking by teachers/nuns that I’ve heard going on in catholic-type schools. You’d get sent to the principle’s office and he’d administer the spanking, if needed.
They would however shame us in front of the whole class. I remember one year, I had walked down the heels of my shoes but we only got one pair per year (dad drank up and gambled away any extra money), so I had to keep wearing them. My teacher decided it was her place to teach me a lesson about this and made me put my shoes (heels towards the class) on her desk, in front of the whole class for one entire afternoon.
It amazes me that she would do that, actually. Surely she could see that my family was poor since I always had cheap clothes and hand-me-downs, and yet she still thought it was a good idea to shame me about something I couldn’t do anything about. I’m sure she saw that I never wore any other shoes–might have clued her in that I didn’t HAVE any other pair of shoes. But who knows. People can be such jerkwads.
I always considered art and singing/music to be my main areas of interest; I hated math with a passion, although once into college, to my amazement, I easily got A’s in what classes I did take. Later, I had to take statistics in my master’s program and did just fine, and found I could easily do the math required for loading and shoring stuff on thin aircraft floor, as well as the weight and balance form for aircraft take off/landing data, during my loadmaster days.
What I have since figured out is that I was trying to learn this stuff (got a LOW B in 9th grade algebra because I could learn it by rote, but never really ‘got’ it) before my brain was mature enough. I’m an August baby which made me one of the youngest in my class. But once I got into college (a number of years later), I found algebra to be quite easy, but I’m still pretty traumatized by the whole ‘trying but just never getting it’ thing.
As for smarts, I never considered myself all that smart because I had an overachieving older sis with straight A’s. Now if you know anything about family dynamics, you know I couldn’t also get straight A’s, because she already had that role. So I usually got more A’s than B’s, but didn’t get straight A’s until my last semester in HS, (I admit I had to beg my orchestra teacher to fudge a bit to help make that happen).
It wasn’t until I got into the Marine Corps that I realized I was actually pretty smart, where they offered me computer programmer training if I’d just re-enlisted for another 2 years, so obviously my enlistment test scores were pretty good. I sadly didn’t accept that though. I thought I wouldn’t stay past my 2 year initial enlistment.
I was a very poor reader as a child however. In 6th grade, they had this little reading improvement course thingy with cards of increasing complexity as you got better. It actually worked for me. By the end, I was reading from the blue tabbed cards which were the highest level. I had started on the cards which were only one above the lowest. I just found the higher level cards to be so much more interesting, so I really pushed myself to learn to read faster so I would get to read those instead.
At that point, I started checking out books from the school library, and found SF to be the most interesting, and began devouring any and all SF/fantasy I could find. Anyway, I’m very glad that reading program worked! It has served me well thru my life, especially in college and my master’s program. Last I checked, I was reading 600+ wpm which eats up books quite fast unfortunately, but it is more like watching a movie at that speed, for me, which is nice.
Nowadays, SF/fantasy is the only kind of book I read, and frankly, since life has enough pain and anguish, I only read the ones with happy endings. Same with Movies. Like the movie “Titantic” for example. I will never go see it because I KNOW it has a miserable ending.
And leprechauns are one of the elder races, directly related to the fairies. So, yes, ‘magic’ aka working with raw energy via mental intention, is very much a skill of theirs. And they are actually pretty powerful. The saying “Don’t piss off the fairies” is a good one. They can be quite petty and spiteful if they take a disliking to you! *lol*
The shoes thing was entirely reprehensible. I’d rather be hit. My 2nd grade teacher was old-school, purple haired and getting a little dotty, so she had an excuse.
I was a teacher myself, and if I have one observation above all others is that most really smart people constantly worry that they’re stupid (why? because they can see more than one answer) and most really stupid people are convinced the world is black and white, good and evil, and that, of course, they know which is which.
I sure thought so, too, CJ, and I would have much rather been hit than humiliated all afternoon. My teacher, Miss Ring, was older too, gray haired and cranky as my mom before coffee, but still, in my mind, NO excuse.
And huge Kudos to you for being a teacher. I don’t really like kids so that would have been a bad career choice for me. Sadly, these days though, the dumbing down of America is driving all the good teachers into other professions where they get paid better and don’t have to put up with such impossible working conditions.
BTW, Paul, in some reckoning ‘r’ is a complex vowel. Especially as American English uses it. It’s why it drives non-native speakers crazy trying to learn it. In a way, ar, er, or, ir, and ur are dipthongs, though they are never reckoned as such.
I give you the Oklahoma/Texas pronunciation of English phrases, like rat cheer (right here.)
Pank. (pink). K’mawn yall. (Come on, you all.) Yall siddown. (You pl sit down.) Whacha won hon? (What do you want, hon(ey)?) and Yall gitcher ass offa mah lon. (Please remove your donkey from my lawn.)
Nobody ever gave “English” points for regularity. 😉
Sure and to some extent those are derived from “Elizabethan” English as Bonnie Prince Charlie’s refugees scattered into the Appalachian hollers, still playing that old timey dance music.
Some of us are rat rill arnry. (My father was born west of Tulsa, on a ranch that’s now mostly under water, and grew up in Bartlesville.)
The versus Ye, I can answer. The full answer is a trip through English history going all the way back to the Anglo-Saxons. The short answer is, if you see a “y” used as a “y” sound, such as “ye, you, your, yours,” it’s really a Y. If you see a “y” used as a “th” sound, “ye olde shoppe” for “the,” or a few others (the “th-” pronouns, this, these, that, those) it’s actually a Thorn, an old runic (futhark) letter. Over time, the scribes changed the shape of the thorn so that it looked almost like a Y, and so as not to confuse it with the real Y upsilon, they put a dot above the real Y like they did above the I, while the thorn had no dot. After the Norman French conquered England, English was re-spelled the Norman French way, and the runic letters were dropped in favor of spelling that looked and sounded right to a Norman French eye and ear. But the thorn persisted a little longer with that y-like shape and with the real dotted y. But by the time the printing press and movable type arrived, people used the same y letter for both, and had dropped the dot, and “th” was mostly used, except when being purposefully old-fashioned. Eventually, even the memory that there had been a y-like thorn versus a dotted-y real y was lost, and you began hearing and seeing “ye” when they really meant “the.” The “ye” for “you” was always with the real Y, after the yogh y/gh rune was absorbed into the Latin g letter. It’s ironic: If the Normans had kept the Anglo-Saxon spelling conventions, some of our spelling problems would never have existed. The “gh” would’ve been simply “h,” for instance, and ah versus ae would’ve been sensible. (W, double-u or double-v, is easier to read than the pointy/triangular p-like wen, though. Y is easier than the 3-like or g-like yogh.)
Short version again: “Ye” as “you” is always with a Y. “Ye” was the old nominative (subject) case for the dative/accusative (object case) you. “Ye” as “the” is a case of confusing two letters, y-like thorn and dotted y.
Some of that I’d heard/read, but only that ye meant second-person familiar you, i.e. thee. Did know about the occasional French words and pronounciations being affectations by the native English in attempts to be taken for part of the new ruling class. (My last name is Norman, though it came across from (Norman-)Welsh Quakers of Meryioneth(shire), as were some of my ancestors apparently.)
I finished listening to Cuckoo’s Egg, which coincidentally has a Thorn of a human kind in Duun’s side.
C.J., you left off “hoddy” (howdie) and “fixinta” (fixing to), not to mention “kech ona far” (catch on fire) and the ubiquitous “bob war” (barbed wire).
Talk about butchering the R sound! I’m from that neck of the woods that ‘Pahks the cah in Havahd Yahd.’ After a few years moving around mostly in the south, when I started school back in New England they sent me to the speech therapist to ‘fix’ my accent. Thank goodness it just taught me to pick up whatever accent everyone else uses!
My personal nemesis in grade school was Mrs. Cove for third grade English . The teachers were not allowed to use corporal punishment, but Mrs. Cove had a way of getting ahold of your arm and wrenching that SHOULD have been outlawed. Usually I got into trouble because I was far more interested in reading non-class work than memorizing spelling words. I’d get busted reading in class and be wrenched then go home and hear about it from my parents! SERIOUS punishment (rarely enacted, thank goodness) was the removal of all non-school books for a week… No library books, no reading my own books, no snagging books from my sibs. I think mom gave up on using it because I had way too many squirreled away for her to monitor.
My sister have found some ancestral “Pabodie”‘s in Massachusetts. Peabody’s I suppose.
HAS! (sheesh!)